"Monet Refuses the Operation " - Liesel Mueller

I've been reading Liesel Mueller's poems again these last few days, and was prompted to search for one I particularly admired and discussed in Reckonings about four years ago. Mueller's book of poems, The Need to Hold Still (1980), won the National Book Award, and her Alive Together: New & Selected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

The Private Life, a book of 73 short poems in which "Monet Refuses the Operation" first appeared,  was Liesel Mueller's second book of poems, published in 1976. That collection, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection, is filled with poems exploring the character of human lives with wonderful insight and power. Dick Allen wrote of those poems that he experienced "shocks of recognition.... She goes after our secrets, this poet; often, she finds them." Russell Brignano added that "her verses are filled with captivating figures and metaphors, projecting an imaginative, deeply reflective, subtle intelligence."

 "Monet Refuses the Operation" is written in the voice of Claude Monet as an elderly man speaking to his physician. He has returned from a visit with the doctor in which the doctor has advised him to have surgery for an undisclosed ailment. The doctor has also advised his patient to abandon his gift of metaphoric imagination - the center of his life personally and as an artist - and return to a more literal, as the doctor would have it, more realistic view of the world. Monet, thankfully, refuses both the operation and the gratuitous and insensitive advice.

 

Sadly, that doctor's comments are still not unusual in our day. A friend recently told me she had been to her doctor recently: he came bustling into the examining room, his hands full of papers, saying "Now, here are the lab reports..." My friend, like Monet, stopped him and said, "You must ask me first, "How are you?" Fortunately the doctor complied, and I hope learned a lesson about human relationships that is not commonly taught in medical schools.

Perhaps returning home after that unsettling visit, Monet sits at his desk and puts into words the truth of experience the doctor does not understand. He does so clearly and beautifully, not in anger but eloquently and in a kind of wistful sympathy for the doctor's lack of imagination. He wishes his doctor might have something of the gift he has taken most of a lifetime to acquire.

 

Monet Refuses the Operation

 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

 

 

 

The last triptych of Monet's paintings of water lilies on his pond at Giverny was painted near the end of his life, during the years 1920 to 1922. He was going blind, and many early critics found these paintings obscure and ill-made because his eyesight was failing, reflecting an alleged realism kin to that of Monet's doctor in Liesl Mueller's poem. The triptych lay in Monet's studio for twenty years after his death. Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they were the subject of a special MOMA exhibition in late 2010 and early 2011. (Mueller herself was growing blind when she wrote the poem.) MOMA's curator on that occasion spoke revealingly of their character in contrast to Monet's paintings of the same water lilies 25 years earlier:

 

"The Japanese Footbridge is among Monet's last paintings of this subject, made between 1920 and 1922. Twenty-five years earlier, in the late 1890s, the footbridge provided the subject of Monet's first series of paintings of his pond at Giverny. While the paintings in the earlier series are more naturalistic in style, the later works feature dense swirls and loose strokes of color that almost obscure the form of the bridge. These later paintings also feature a fiery palette of maroons, rusts, and oranges unique within Monet's body of work.... The aim of his large Water Lilies paintings, Monet said, was to supply 'the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or bank.'  In the attempt to capture the constantly changing qualities of natural light and color, spatial cues all but dissolve; above and below, near and far, water and sky all commingle. In his enveloping, large-scale canvases Monet sought to create 'the refuge of a peaceful meditation in the center of a flowering aquarium.'"

 

The last lines of Mueller's poem, again expressly addressing the doctor, speak of an opportunity awaiting any of us. To know how "the heart expands to claim this world," how any and all of our experience of the myraid things of this world can be transformed into the bright gift of a thousand suns, we have only to wait, to find "the refuge of a peaceful meditation." To gain some inkling of what is suggested by heaven pulling earth into its arms, we have only to disenthrall ourselves, to exercise our common gift of metaphoric imagination, to wait and yearn, to meditate or pray,  so we are in time — in a lifetime and in a moment — drawn into a larger consciousness of that which moves mysteriously and in silence behind, above and beyond us.